The International Cooking Club

Thursday, 4 August 2011

Last night I came to the conclusion that sometimes, despite all the carbless and protein focussed diets out there, besides chocolate, a woman needs pasta.... and the requisition of this pasta must always be 'GOOOOOD and fulfilling'!!!!
Moreover, there is way too little pasta on this blog... so let's get some change into that.

Chef Raffaella made a good and rather healthy fettucini for me a couple of months ago and it didn't get lost in my database of mouthwatering pictures of food, it was just on hold for the right moment. Its moment has come to shine!

Ingredients:

400 gr fettucine or tagliatelle

4 zucchini

200 gr mushrooms

150 gr bacon cubes (Italian call this speck, which is a gourmet version of bacon)

olive oil

garlic

How to make it:

Heat up a pan of water with a fist of salt for your pasta and bring it to a boil. When it boils, add the pasta and cook it according to what is written on the packaging. Keep the indication for 'al dente' pasta as you will be cooking it some more in the end together with the sauce in your frying pan.

Cut up the vegetables in little cubes and slices.

While you cook the pasta you heat up a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a frying pan, fry the garlic and add the zucchini for a couple of minutes until they get tender. Then you add the mushrooms and some salt. Add a couple of tablespoons of pastawater and let it simmer for circa 5 minutes with the lid on. After which you add the bacon cubes. Give it a good stir and let it simmer for another 10 minutes but keep an eye on the pan as you want to avoid the sauce of getting dry. If it does, add some of the pasta water into the sauce.

Once your pasta is cooked al dente, take it out of the pan with a pastaspoon or a pair of pincers as you want the pasta to remain wet while adding it to the sauce. Pastawater contains starch that will densify the sauce a bit. Stir the whole for a couple of minutes on a low 'fire' and then you are done!

Friday, 29 July 2011

TGIF!! Yeah baby.. it is friday... it is summer - well for most people out there. In my beloved Amsterdam that I so was looking forward to moving to, it is cloudy, rainy & cold! Seriously NOT cool.

But once the sunshine is out, the whole Dutch population drops whatever it is they're doing and runs outside, dusts off their sunglasses to put them on their white little faces and right after they have a chilled beer they turn on a BBQ at home or in a park nearby to put on some juicy burgers!! That's summer for us, once in a decade... sigh!

Ingredients:

a man

1-2 burgers per person

1-2 buns per person

cheddar

tomatoes sliced

pickles sliced

cucumbers sliced

salad

mayonaise

ketchup

How to make it:

Dust your BBQ and find a man to do the hard work of preparing the BBQ. Playing with fire is just their cup of tea so you shouldn't have any trouble in finding a volunteer. If you do, just say you will reward him with a big fat home made burger. No man on earth will resist you! (did I just come up with a new theory on how to seduce a man???)

Hmmmm meat!

Once the BBQ is hot and steamy, put on the rack and throw the burgers on there.

Twist and turn until done; this should take around 7-10 minutes depending on the thickness of your burger.

Add the cheddar on the burger a minute before it's done so that it can melt nicely.

Monday, 25 July 2011

When I left my old job at Adverteam, I brought my dear colleagues something to remember me by: Cherry Fudge Ice Cream, made of panna ice cream which is basically ice cream of whipped cream, fresh cherries and caramel sauce. It was divine!!!